Pointed to my server- stolen site

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intcon

8:23 pm on Nov 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

Hello!

Last night one of my customers emailed me a URL...it wasn't his URL, but when I went to it, it's his site. Another company in China has pointed their DNS servers at his domain name. First, isn't that illegal? Second, our hosting company said sorry, we can't do anything. Third - why? Since they're in China I have a hard time believing there's anything we can do about it, but why would they do that? are they stealing our search engine rankings?

thoughts? can I do anything?

carrie

yaix2

1:52 am on Nov 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

As long as you have a canonical url specified in the page's meta data, there should be no problem with search engines.

You could add a javascript to check if the site was called under the correct domain and if not, redirect it.

I am not sure, how to point a DNS to a domain name. Maybe it's a proxy mirror of your site? In any case, the above should help.

outrun

2:42 am on Nov 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

Best way to avoid the search engine problem is to check the domain name server side and redirect to the correct domain if it's the incorrect domain name.

Doing it via JavaScript may trigger a cloaking penalty.

intcon

4:27 am on Nov 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

can you explain to me the canonical url yaix2? I'd appreciate it... outrun....sorry, can I ask how that works? also..WHY would anyone do this? I just don't get it..

carrie

buckworks

4:51 am on Nov 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

There's a good chance that this situation is accidental, not deliberate and not malicious.

I had the same thing happen a few months ago when I moved to a new server. Someone else had two domains still pointing to one of the IP addresses that was new to me but had been his in a previous contract. The content for one of our sites was showing up under those domains as well as for the real domain.

We spotted the problem because of some odd referrers in our analytics, and we solved it by phoning the owner of the "rogue" domains, getting him to look at what was happening, and asking him to update his DNS. He did so very quickly after he understood the problem.

If you can track down a contact for the problem domains, make a polite request that they update their DNS. You might or might not get cooperation, especially if language is a barrier, but it's certainly worth a try.